Flexible Science Resources for home learning or in the classroom
With the start of a new year and a new lockdown, we’ve collected together some of our favourite free resources to support our fantastic network of STEM educators as they continue to provide STEM-tastic learning for children at home or in the classroom.
Practical science enquiry videos
Starters for Science is a series of five-minute videos created by the Primary Science Teaching Trust to support teachers to get started with practical science enquiry. They require minimal resources and can be used in school or at home. This means that teachers can do science enquiry with a class and any children who are at home can do the same lesson.
Each video includes:
- A question or scenario related to the real world
- Time for children to think about what they already know
- A demonstration of a starter practical activity
- Time for children to think of their own questions
- Ideas about what they could find out for themselves
- Encouragement to share what they found with others
These videos are designed to get children doing some simple practical science enquiry and as such are not age specific, nor directly aligned to any particular curriculum unit. They are intended to give children valuable practical experiences that they will then be able to draw on once they meet the relevant concepts in a more formal learning situation.
Access the videos and Teacher Notes here.
Online student-led STEM enrichment activity
I’m a Scientist is a flexible online, student-led STEM enrichment activity, which runs throughout the year. It connects school students with working scientists through energetic real-time text based chats. Everyone can take part from home or school.
New for January 2021 CHRISTMAS LECTURES: Planet Earth Zone (environment and sustainability theme).
Students can:
- Chat with real scientists, in real time
- Ask any questions they like
- Vote for their favourite scientists
It all happens online. It’s safe and secure. It’s free for UK schools. Find out more here.
Competitions and project based learning
The Leaders Award
This competition by Primary Engineer is a creative problem solving, literacy and entrepreneurial project which asks children the question ‘If you were an Engineer, what would you do?‘, encouraging them to look at the world around them to find problems an engineered solution could solve.
Along with a range of home learning and school resources available to everyone who registers, the Leaders Award host a series of online Engineer Interviews throughout the year which aim to provide pupils with the chance to meet real life engineers in a virtual environment and discover the wide variety of disciplines engineering covers.
The next interview with an Engineer will take place on Tuesday January 19th at 9.30am – you can book your place here.
The Great Science Share for Schools
This annual campaign encourages young people to ask, investigate and communicate their own scientific questions with new audiences. It’s free to take part and children can get involved both in the classroom or from home. The GSS team have put together lots of brilliant resources to help get your children asking great questions, you can access them here.
Is there something missing?
We’d love to hear from you about your experiences teaching STEM during this unusual time. Do you have any requests for resources of a particular style, subject or key stage? Perhaps it’s support with remote delivery that you are after? Contact our team and we’ll do our very best to help support you through this.
